Several film critics walked out of a showing of the first full-length film written and directed by Houellebeck at the 61st Locarno movie festival. Others giggled or made rude remarks.
Oh dear, it seems as fashionable for the critics to knock Houellebecq down as it once was to laud him to the heavens. Lets hope this is what is happening here and that the film is not as dreadful as it sounds.
The 61st Locarno film festival will feature the premier of Michel Houellebecq’s eagerly awaited dramatisation of his own novel ‘The Possibility of an Island’. The futuristic dystopia of this work took the author’s recurring Schopenhaurian theme (that suffering and conflict are intrinsic elements of existence)to it’s fullest and most satisfying extent yet. I haven’t been able to garner a lot of information about the film version so far, but I understand that it focuses on the second half of the novel, that is the cloning of Daniel and the rise and fall of the cult that enables it. The festival will run from the 6th - 12th of August.
Here is a short trailer to whet your appetite :
To tie in with the post below about teenage boys brutally killing each other in their need for sexual acceptance from females, here is a book review I posted for Amazon a few days ago. Genuine eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa are awful psychological conditions. For feminists to exploit such a condition by claiming that counting calories and being ‘obsessed’ with looking good is a reason to demonize men is, well….shocking.
’This book is not only false and misleading on so many levels, it’s actually dangerous. Books like these now influence public policy and legislation and when the victims will not only be middle-aged men paying for the patriarchal sins of their forefathers, but also children and young people, then its time to read with a little more critical sobriety.
No matter the exaggerated number, but very real tragedy, of young women suffering from eating disorders - they have complex psychological causes. What is more, obesity clearly represents a far greater and urgent health problem facing our young people. Many American tourists come to my city and I have to say that I have never spotted an anorexic amongst them. I would however say that around half the young American females I see are unhealthily obese - by any reasonable definition. It strikes me therefore as utterly obscene for an American author to pretend that anorexia (a terrible psychological illness though it is) is in any way comparable to the threat posed by obesity to the health and well being of our young people today.
And yet the author has the audacity to claim (with no empirical proof or rational argument) that obesity itself is simply another eating disorder resulting from the evil objectification of the female body by men. Does obesity really have nothing to do with the junk food culture or the failure of parents to teach children responsible eating habits? Or, in fact, that so many females now DON’T care about living up to traditional ideas of femininity and grace? If we ban images of slim women (as the French have recently done) we will simply be guilty of encouraging obesity and therefore of abusing our children…even if middle-aged feminists no longer feel jealous rage whenever they watch a bikini model in a beer commercial or threatened by a slim teenage girl turning the heads of their husbands (they will all be over 18 stone soon before they even hit puberty).
Actually, it would be far better for the physical health of young Americans (if not the psychological health of middle-aged feminists) for young girls to be given compulsory beauty classes at college. Wanting too much to be attractive to the opposite sex appears to be the last thing on the average American girl’s mind.
Of course, no mention is made of the millions of young American males who are now force feeding themselves daily with steroids in order to be sexually acceptable to the opposite sex, knowing that they will likely be dead at 40 through liver disease or some other consequence.
What does the author really want men to do and what would be the consequences for us if we did it? Are we really to feel guilt and self-hatred at finding slim females attractive? Should we start cutting ourselves in shame and guilt every time an image of Maria Shaparova enters our heads instead of an 20 stone Russian shot putter (or feminist)?
And why no public discussion of the grotesque female sexual fetishisation of urban gangsta culture? Something that increasingly turns our young men into violent brutes willing to kill each other in a warped and tragic desire to seek validation from their female peers?’
London has been shocked by a spate of teenage killings and stabbings, appearing to reach a gruesome apogee in the past week with the murder of 16 year old Ben Kinsella and the astonishingly brutal slaying of two young research students from France. 55 London teenagers have been killed in the last 18 months. The press has been full of debate as to the causes and the solutions, though usually not rising above the simplistic (such as increasing the penalties for carrying knives). What is not in doubt is that there is an increasing problem with youth violence in London and the UK in general.
No doubt there are a number of complex causes for the increase in youth violence but in my opinion a major one is feminism and the sexual fetishisation of male violence. Feminism, the welfare state, and the pill, have led to a female sexual emancipation to go along with the political one. Young females no longer have to strive to attract a respectable, hard working financially secure young man who will devote his life to providing resources to their child. Young men no longer have to demonstrate that they have the desire and the ability to provide financial resources for the female. Instead the sexuality of the female has returned to a more brutal and primitive level, where the qualities that are sought after are the physical ones of ’size’ and raw aggression. In London we seem to be observing a kind of sexual arms race amongst young males. To catch the young female’s eyes now, it is no longer enough to be seen walking down the street with one pit bull terrior, but with 3 or 4 of the snarling monsters. It is not enough anymore to belong to a street gang - you have to belong to the most vicious street gang in the neighbourhood, preferably one that already has ‘proven’ itself in battle by killing rivals.
Teenage boys don’t do much without girls in mind. Violence and aggression to seek sexual validation from the opposite sex is a grotesque tragedy but one that is increasingly blighting life in the capital, and particularly damaging to the black community. I will be posting a longer article about this shortly, but for now consider that the femi-nazi claim - ‘if there were no men there would be no wars’ can be turned into ‘if there were no women there would be no wars’.
I’m currently reading a book which had, until recently, lain unread on my bookshelf for far too long a time. That changed when I came across an online review and realized just how important it was to finally pick it up and study it. And for me, the effect of finally reading this has been similar to that which I felt upon encountering John Gray and Michel Houllebecq for the first time. What for others might remain a vague, unarticulated disenchantment at the ‘progress’ of western society, Tiger articulates into a piercingly sharp and bold vision as to just why it is that the contemporary liberal society is so far from being the best of all possible worlds. In doing so he courageously pulls the rug from under some of the Humanist’s most cherished assumptions and shows them to be nothing more than unsupportable, superstitious delusions.
Houllebecq laid bair the delusion that liberal humanism has led to a fairer and more equal society. Gray showed that it was a delusion to think that it invariably would. Tiger shows that even our supposed ‘progress’ (in this case feminism - the political and social emancipation of women) has been nothing more than an interplay of primitive biology and sexual reproductive needs and the sudden and unpredictable introduction of a new technology into human affairs (the contraceptive pill).
Lionel Tiger is a respected anthropologist at Rutgers University. ‘The Decline of Males’, is an attempt to explain a remarkable transformation in human society through the lens of Darwinism. In the space of little more than a single generation the relationship between the genders has changed beyond recogniton, overturning a rigid framework that had existed in nearly every human society on earth for thousands of years. It is arguable that this transformation represents as much of a revolution in the way that human beings live as was the neolithic or the industrial, and furthermore it has been conducted at a greater speed than even the latter was. Whereas in the 1960’s only a fifth or so of undergraduates where female, now even at post-graduate level females are the majority. The mothers of the 60’s generation were expected to be docile housewives, the daughters of that generation have the choice of nearly every possible career path open to them. I believe that at this moment, the Justice minister or equivalent of Germany, France and Britain are all female. Angela Merkel is chancellor of Germany and Hilary Clinton is overwhelming favourite to become the next President of America, partly (or mainly) because it seems that America is ‘not ready’ for a black president. And even before gaining actual positions of power in political government, laws regarding sexuality have been, for some time, decided almost exclusively by women through a plethora female dominated pressure groups.
How has this staggering re-evaluation of gender roles come about? Most would like to think that the reason is feminism, a steady continuem of hard fought advances in the struggle for equal rights that began with the enfranchisement of women earlier in the century. Tiger thinks otherwise. He looks to the increasingly liberal attitudes that exploded out of the 60’s together with other social changes, such as the breakdown in the family, and argues that their cause lies in a singular, unique event. Feminism did not cause these changes, rather feminism was a necessity forced upon women and society by these changes, a symptom and perhaps an aggravation but not the primary cause. The singular event was, in fact, the widespread introduction of the pill as a means of contraception, controlled by women, meaning for the first time that one sex had complete control over the forces of reproduction. For the first time Men were excluded from knowledge of the reproductive process.
Reading the book and ingesting Tiger’s argument has been a revelatory experience for me, because here at last, I have found an author who explicitly claims that feminism is (or at least has become) nothing much more than a largely unconscious reaction to primitive and fundamental reproductive needs. Not only is this something I have believed for a long time, but Tiger’s basic claim that it is control of the sexual means of reproduction that is the great social, moral and political mover (rather than control of the economic means of production, as the Marxists believed) is something I have also believed for many years.
I will write more about this book and my own theories about feminism in the coming weeks. Tiger’s arguments are so fundamental and yet so relatively new and unique, that they allow a myriad of further speculations and arguments to develop. Could his argument explain why western feminists are so silent over the subjugation of women in the Islamic world? Could the seemingly already established feminist theocracy in the west be just as quickly dethroned by some other technological development (Tiger sees the increasing availability of paternity tests to be just such a development)?
This site has been rather inactive up to now. Although I’m busier than ever, I hope to devote a little more time to it henceforth. I haven’t lost interest in the idea of the site. Perhaps this would be a good time to remind myself why I feel these two writers (Houellebecq and Gray) to be so important. I haven’t seen a webpage or indeed an article that links these two together, yet it seems obvious to me that they both have much in common, sufficient in fact for me to suggest, through this blog, that they are the most prominent exponents of an intellectual ‘attitude’ (if not yet movement) that deserves the label ’Posthumanism’.
Essentially, both writers have attacked the idea of the inevitibility of progress in human affairs, and that modern western humanism is an inevitable expression of such progress. Despite dealing with some very lofty philosophical themes, both writers have reached a remarkably large audience, clearly demonstrating that this ‘attitude’ is something that a great number of people share in. An increasing number, I believe, are feeling disenfranchised from the supposed ‘progress’ that society is making. Globalisation is witnessing not just the increase in power of multi-national business corporations but also an increase in the power of international political organisations to affect the legal and moral systems of nearly every society in the world. Invariably, these organisations are dominated by people who share a certain vision of how the world should be. They are ‘liberals’ and ‘humanists’ who subscribe with an almost religious certainty to a set of beliefs pertaining, for example, to the relations between men and women, or to sexual morality or to democratic capitalism. These people assume that such a vision is a progression on what has gone before. In fact, the contrast with what has gone before is often explicitly the justification for assuming that their vision is right. Humanity is progressing, therefore these new moral codes must be an improvement.
Michel Houellebecq and John Gray attack this vision and the assumptions behind it in slightly different ways. John Gray is a liberal in the sense that he has liberal attitudes towards such things as tolerance for homosexuality. In Black Mass he states that our increasing tolerance is a good thing. Nevertheless he believes that the idea of moral progress in human affairs as being inevitable is deluded, in fact a remanent of Christian thinking. Humans remain animals, to forever be dominated by their environment, no matter how much technological sophistication and apparent mastery of nature we gain.
My favourite cinematic image as a schoolboy was one of the opening scenes in 2001: a space odyssey where a primitive ape-man, one of our ancestors, after brutally beating a rival to death with a club, throws the object spinning into the air, up into the sky above, at which point the director Stanley Kubrick ingeniously transform the club into a floating spaceship. The image seemed to me to capture the essential truth of man. First that whatever technological progress he makes, he is still fundamentally an ape. Whatever technology he invents will always be a tool for his animal needs and necessities. Whatever technology he invents, from a club, an interstellar spaceship or an artificially intelligent computer, he will neither be able to control nor predict the outcome its appearance in the world will have.
For Houellebecq, not only is the inevitability of progress an illusion, but the very idea that western society has progressed at all in the 20th century is a manifest absurdity. Houellebecq attacks the liberal assumptions that perhaps even Gray would share about contemporary society. Western civilisation is not progressing, it is actually regressing. A major illustration of this, for Houellebecq, is the value that society now places on older people, which as far as he is concerned, seems to be very little. He speaks with outrage over the thousands of elderly people who were killed across Europe in the Summer heatwave of 2006 and the scandalous way in which such a thing was accepted. He writes of the obsession with youth and with youthful hedonistic pleasure which is valued increasingly at the expense of maturity and wisdom. The morals and values of western civilisation are regressing backwards to that of a primitive and ruthless tribe that would leave its old people to die rather than let them take resources from the young.
‘Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia’ was published recently to reviews that ranged from the damning (and slightly infantile) to the highly laudatory. Building on the thesises explored in ‘Straw Dogs’ and ‘Heresies’, this work is far more rigorous and academic than those two remarkably successful books, yet still contains some of the charming and ingenious references to popular culture that made reading them so engaging.
The argument in those books was essentially that progress in human affairs is an illusion, and that the belief that such progress is inevitable or even possible is a remnant of Christian thinking. Since the publication of Straw Dogs, we have witnessed the disastrous attempt to export the western liberal humanist system to the sands of the middle east through means of clusterbombs and G.I Joe. Its inevitable and humiliating failure was predicted by Gray in numerous essays penned during the early stages of the war and collected in ‘Heresies’.
’Black Mass’ reads as something of an unhappy vindication of Gray’s recent publications, and stands as an exhaustive attempt to analyse how it is that we came to believe that we could ’shock and awe’ an entire people into adopting western norms of liberalism, democracy and feminism. The events of the last few years have simply demonstrated why John Gray needs to be read. This latest work isn’t faultess or beyond criticism, but by and large, it delivers as an immensely important and considered judgement on the folly of the Iraq project and its likely historical significance. A fuller rumination on Black Mass will appear here shortly…in the meantime, some links to the major online reviews :
Rocky road to utopia (The Guardian)
The Dangers of Utopia (Literary Review - Alan Ryan)
John Gray’s Apocalypse (The Times)
Form Uncle Joe to the boy George (Daily Telegraph)
Apocalypse now and then (Independent)
The disorders of faith and the death of utopia (Times Literary Supplement)
It is my intention that this site will serve as a source of information, links and news, concerning a deep, fundamental and very contemporary philosophical question. This question is : Can human beings, using their ever increasing knowledge of themselves and the world around them, control their relationship to that world, and through technology, escape from their biological sufferings and limitations, or are we destined to be forever simply another species of animal restrained by the natural world, as all other lifeforms appear to be?
The question, I think, is deep and fundamental, because it goes to the root of what human nature is, what we are and what we can become. It is contemporary because due to advances in the bio-sciences such as genetics, we are quite possibly on the verge of discovering the answer to the question. It is urgent, because, in the view of many sober people, we are fast reaching an apocalyptical point in human development, where a combination of technological revolutions, dwindling natural resources, and climate change mean that humanity has to transform itself if it is to survive for very much longer.
This site will thus be dedicated to the philosophical issues regarding human nature, its relationship to the natural world, and its capacity to control that relationship. ‘Trans-humanism’ is the label that has been given to the belief that human beings can transform their natures, and that science is likely to make this a reality in the coming decades or centuries. ‘Post-humanism’ may be loosely defined as a kind of alternative, negative position, the belief that it is time to abandon the humanist assumption that we are somehow separate and above the rest of the natural world. If that is the case, we can only transform human nature superficially, we cannot change our fundamental animal nature. Nor can we fully control whatever process of change that scientific advances may engender.
I tend towards the post-humanist position, however this site will explore both sides of the argument, examining the particular arguments of proponents, the issues at stake, and reporting and commenting upon latest scientific breakthroughs, studies, philosophical papers and literary novels. Two of the thinkers that I am most interested in and I would regard as leading post-humanists are the French novelist Michel Houellebecq and the British philosopher John Gray. I am hoping to include in the site detailed critiques of the works of both of these contemporary intellectuals. I would be grateful for any help in making ThePostHumanists.com a useful contribution to the debate. Please feel free to leave comments or to recommend any philosophers/writers that you feel are part of the debate and that I should include in these pages.
